The Ten Causes of America’s Political Dysfunction

Here is my most complete talk on the causes of America’s rising political polarization and dysfunction. It’s more pessimistic than my prior talks. I was invited to speak in November at the NYU Law School, at a session hosted by professor Rick Pildes. Pildes wrote a superb law review article in 2011 on the causes of our dysfunction, from an “institutionalist” perspective, looking at Congress and electoral processes: Why the Center Does Not Hold: The Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in America

When I first read it, I thought Pildes’s account of the history was enlightening, but I thought he was too negative about the chances for real reform. But I re-read his paper while preparing for this talk, and realized he was right — and prophetic. He predicted that Obama would soon start bypassing congress and implementing policy by regulatory fiat; he predicted that one or both parties would soon start cutting back on the filibuster, unilaterally.

In this talk I integrate moral psychology with recent American history to explain the TEN reasons why America has been getting more polarized — at the elite level AND at the mass (public) level. My talk runs from minute 2 to minute 46, and then there’s commentary from Pildes, then open discussion.

3) Generational changing of the guard, from Greatest Gen to Baby Boomers, 1990s

4) Changes in Congress, 1995—death of friendships

5) Media fractionation and polarization, since 1980s

6) Residential homogeneity, urban v. rural, 1990s

7) Increasing role of money, negative advertising, 2000s

8) End of the cold war, loss of a common enemy, 1989

9) Increasing immigration and racial diversity, 1990s

10) Increasing education, since 1970s (more educated citizens are more partisan and opinionated about politics)

I show how these 10 trends interact with the moral psychology I presented in The Righteous Mind to produce the strong and steady rise in polarization that we’ve seen since the 1990s. Note that most of these trends cannot be reversed. Morality binds and blinds, and for these 10 reasons, morality been binding us ever more tightly in the last 10-20 years. “Affective partisan polarization” — the degree to which we hold negative views of the other team — has been rising steadily, and there is no end in sight.

5 Comments

Hi, I hope this is an appropriate place to post this. From the first time I saw your thesis, I was intrigued but felt that it was lacking in a developmental dimension, which would fundamentally alter the entire hypothesis. I just found this comment on another website, and think it summarizes quite well the limitations. I’d be very interested to hear what you think. The commenter is named “Ola Petiver” – unfortunately, I don’t know anything else about that person.

****** (here it is)

While I greatly admire Haidt’s efforts to tackle the political divide, I strongly disagree with his conclusion that the Left is lacking in the moral modules of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. In fact, it seems inconsistent of him to say, on the one hand, that loyalty and authority come from our view of our relationship to groups, and on the other hand, to argue that the opposition of Left and Right is based on the dynamics of in-group vs. out-group. If we accept that the Left sees itself as a group opposed to the Right, then of course it follows that it exhibits values such as loyalty, authority and sanctity within its group. A good example of loyalty in this regard is found in labor unions (“solidarity forever”), and in all kinds of political protests. A good example of authority is political correctness. And as noted in your summary, the Left often views the environment, or aspects of it, as sacred.

I think there’s a simpler way to understand the Left and Right that better accounts for their views. The evolution of our species has been characterized by the appearance of progressively larger and more complex groups, beginning with families, then tribes, states and now an emerging world or planetary community. The Left, as one would expect for a group often referred to as progressive, identifies with the most recently-evolved social organizations, the nation and now the world community. The Right, often characterizes as more respecting of tradition, Right identifies more closely with the smaller, less complex and much older social organizations that we originated from, the family and local community.

When we view the Left and Right in this manner, we can see that it simply is not true, as Haidt claims, that “conservatives tend to place more of an emphasis on the moral modules that focus in on the importance of group cohesion such as loyalty, authority and sanctity, while liberals tend to eschew these modules in favor of the modules that focus in on the individual, such as care, fairness and liberty.” In fact, liberals and conservatives both respect all of these moral modules. The differences between them result from these moral values being applied to differing levels of groups or social organizations.

For example, both believe in care, but since the Right identifies more closely with the family and local community, it is more interested in care at this level. Examples would be laws protecting private property, and a strong stand against crimes committed against individuals (as opposed to, say, corporate crimes). In contrast, the Left, identifying with larger communities, is concerned with what we generally call social welfare. One could say that the Left views the nation, and increasingly the entire world, as one family, and is thus concerned with laws and regulations that promote care for everyone in general. These laws and regulations promote group cohesion every bit as much as the laws conservatives favor at the family and social level. It’s just that the group is much larger and more complex, and because it is evolutionarily newer, is not yet as cohesive.

The Right’s concept of fairness is centered on keeping the fruits of one’s labor, because, being family and local community-oriented, it does not fully appreciate that individuals do not operate in a vacuum, but are only able to accumulate wealth because of extensive interactions with many other people beyond the community (as illustrated in the example of a canned good at the supermarket). Likewise, the Left favors a more equal distribution of wealth, because, identifying with the larger community, it is more aware of the factors other than individual talent and effort that result in wealth inequalities. One could say that just as a conservative would strive to treat all his or her children equally, despite differences in their talent and efforts, liberals have the same attitude towards everyone in the nation, which they regard as a family.

Likewise, the Right views liberty in terms of less governmental regulation, because it does not identify strongly with national or transnational communities, and therefore regards any regulation at these levels as being imposed from outside or beyond itself. The Right has much less of a problem with regulation at the family level (strict rules applied to children) or local community level (strong police force), because it identifies strongly with social organizations at this level, and therefore sees itself as participating in the rules, rather than simply having them imposed on itself. Conversely, the Left, identifying more strongly with the national community, does not view governmental regulation as outside of itself, but as a process that it is intimately a part of.

As you note in your summary, Haidt believes that, “conservatives generally… believe that people need external constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions… Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay” (loc. 5129). On the other hand, liberals are more optimistic here. They tend to believe that “people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed”

But an alternative way to view this is to say that conservatives, because they identify mostly strongly with the family and local community, view necessary constraints as external to themselves, coming from beyond. Liberals believe just as much in these constraints (e.g., political correctness), but because they identify more strongly with the larger communities from which these restraints derive, they do not see them as external to themselves. In this sense, people are “inherently good”, because they are the source of the very regulations that improve their own lives. Likewise, liberals are more sanguine about change, since they view these regulations as coming from within themselves.

This view of Left vs. Right, I think, is preferable to the strict vs. nurturing parent model that George Lakoff has proposed. The problem with Lakoff’s model, like the problem with Haidt’s view that liberals lack certain moral modules, is that it is inconsistent with the facts. Liberals are capable of being just as strict as conservatives—again, political correctness is an excellent example—and conservatives are just as capable of being nurturing as liberals—when they promote laws that protect and privatize families.

Don’s point regarding development, more so than the comment he quotes (though its point applies as well to what I’m attempting to add here), is a vital lens to use for critiquing the increasing polarization and dysfunction of government. Maturation (or not), and individually AND socially, are forces that dance with and shape the dynamics of moral psychology. To the degree “Atom World”* is socially infantile and “Matrix World”* more mature, the puzzle of political polarization becomes less complex with this framing…even as the implications of the polarization do not change; are matters for great grief.

If the polarization has a more root cause in society’s failure to foster and honor maturation, what contributes to this condition and/or amplifies it? I posit the failure is an “unintended” consequence of the mass medium of television and the for-profit business model used to broadcast mass media’s content. McLuhan’s insight that the medium is the message has observably morphed, and generationally so, such that it now delimits the message: a message, to be perceived as a socially valued message, is now one that gets broadcasted. Because of the prefrontal cortex’s novelty bias and the constraints the for-profit business model places on content, what garners an audience is not unlike that which constitutes polarization: extremes…& this is because they are perceived to be novel and distract from more focused thinking the prefrontal cortex is also the home to. It seems to me that the focused thinking function is integral to the relatively ‘boring’ dynamics that feed into maturation. If one overlays the retrograde dynamic concerning extremes with the medium’s sound bite practice, as well as its oversimplified dualistic approach to news reporting, it is a reasoned conclusion that television, and now the Internet’s social networking tools, condition us to not only not mature but polarize.

This positive feedback dynamic is affected due to the endogenous opioids released with prefrontal cortex stimuli and functions as an addiction. This is a psychological and sociological dynamic in which extremes are perversely “normalized.” This, when inclusively framed as a development/maturation construct, and incorporated with the moral psychology effort to understand both the social polarization and the governmental dysfunction, results in a less motivated reasoning clouded framing being created. A childish pursuit and expectation of entertaining and valued extremes are a social amplifier that lead to our thoughtlessly lockstep march deeper into the immaturity of our “Atom World”…and thanks to television’s generationally amplified mentoring (forget about the Millennials too), such festive parading is now on steroids.

…or is that crack?

Ola’s critique is one born of the difference’s that reign at the polar ends of the moral continuum that relates to what is felt about a trusted homeostasis more so than what is done, in fact, relative to a moral framework. Such mimics the effect of mass broadcasting media. It’s doing is talking. Arguably it’s overwhelming success in having social value due to this non-doing has affected the normalization of pontification as practice. To the degree this is so, why wouldn’t polarization have become normative; why wouldn’t governmental dysfunctionality have become, but for the pontification and self congratulatory protests of a loyal opposition, tolerated? The complexity of the muddle in the middle just isn’t sufficiently novel to trigger the endogenous opioids to which television, and now the Internet’s social networking tools, have us addicted. We are all but hard wired in our immaturity of action.

Pragmatism rules the muddle of the middle. And there, in the middle, is where CapitalismFail, as a functional religion with all its inherent fallacies and passions, hides in plain sight via motivated reasoning. In my experience, when behavior needs to contradict moral predilections, the pragmatism that is embraced is overwhelmingly a deference to perceived economic “truths” or limits. The liberal moral extreme talks a walk not taken (my critique of Ola’s otherwise astute observation), such that the economic meme can be argued to preclude changing it. The conservative moral extreme inculcates, as limits on moral behavior, those which the meme requires. The extreme conservative, thereby, dutifully walks within–and defends–these limits, which would otherwise be moral contradictions.

Since there is none so blind as they who will not see I’m linking to a poem on my website that may assist with making the hidden visible in fewer words than this otherwise Sysphean task requires. http://www.opento.info/SpirtualMetanoiaHP.html#dis I will pragmatically procrastinate on expanding on my critique of second-wave feminism that is also integral to the polarization and dysfunction–and overlaps the Civil Rights Act time line–I referenced in my Tweets responding to Jonathan’s that links to this blog post.

However, and as a closing effort to roll a stone uphill, I experience Jonathan’s assertion that the matters of klimakatastrophe and the Anthropocene have been too polarized to be worked on hides the truth that these threats, now reality, were always inherent to CapitalismFail and helpfully points to trusted motivated reasoning that define the meme as a functional religion. Relative to Common Law precedent, the oxymoronic limited liability laws enabling financial markets make the assertion an irresponsible and unsubstantiatable statement. There are constitution issues to be redressed as a matter of moral integrity and honor. http://www.opento.info/VirtualTabling.html#1 This is regardless of whether such action fails the test of pragmatism. With such as a reasoned and mature approach to occupy, the political polarization and governmental dysfunction function efficiently as a means of avoiding maturing and, together, muddling through to an understanding of the motivated reasoning of our unconstitutionally established state religion: CapitalismFail.

Perhaps in his next book, _The Moral Psychology of Capitalism_, Jonathan will shine light into this darkness of the mass media amplified, systemically childish irresponsibility of CapitalismFail. The meme owes its current invisibility to both extremes of the moral psychology’s continuum and their providing distracting content for broadcast–and entertainment of–an immaturely irresponsible polity.

Don, thanks for the excellent comment. It articulates very much what I have been uneasy about in Haidt’s hypotheses and does it much better than I could. The developmental-evolutionary dimension is, IMO, critical to where we are today. I wrote about this in Systems Thinking World Journal, in an article entitled “We Are Not the Enemy”: http://stwj.systemswiki.org/?p=1684

I’m fascinated by the recommendation Mr. Haidt makes in this presentation at about the 43 minutes mark. He mentions the possibility of a new emphasis on teaching Civics as education in democracy. I wonder if he is familiar with the work of E.D. Hirsch at Core Knowledge who has been advocating for a return to a Civics oriented curriculum for some time.

His book The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools has some points of contact with Haidt’s conclusions on the tribal nature of political and moral thought. In fact I just recently used The Righteous Mind as part of a blog article exploring Hirsch’s book as a way of understanding one aspect of why our politics is moving in such a polarized direction.

Dear Mr. Davis:
i think your NRO essay is brilliant. OK, i love the fact that you quoted me as part of the story. But it’s a story of how and where we went wrong as a nation, and of how we got into these uncivil times; a story i knew only parts of. I had lunch with Hirsch in the 1990s, soon after I arrived at UVA. I always liked the man and what he stood for. You have greatly elevated him in my eyes.

Thank you for this comment, and for your wonderful essay. You have understood my writing perfectly, and used it to develop an argument that is so important for our country.